[HN Gopher] Open Source Personal Relationship Manager
___________________________________________________________________
Open Source Personal Relationship Manager
Author : taubek
Score : 133 points
Date : 2022-11-14 09:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.monicahq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.monicahq.com)
| rngname22 wrote:
| The one big problem I have with this (and I do take notes after
| some types of conversations with for example first dates through
| fifth dates to remember important things about people), is that I
| fear that if I truly took good notes on conversations with loved
| ones that if the data ever gets leaked / hacked that I've just
| 1000% fucked everyone I've spoken to and took notes about, if I
| record anything that is highly personal and private to them.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is also my personal fear. Instead I just have the people I
| trust in a group chat or Slack group and then I search each of
| these.
| robinhood wrote:
| Author of Monica/Chandler here. Thanks for posting this. As
| others have pointed out, we are rewriting Monica from scratch,
| codename Chandler: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler
|
| We've also written OfficeLife, an open source tool to manage your
| employees: https://github.com/officelifehq/officelife, yet to be
| released.
|
| I think we have too many ideas and side projects :-)
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| I usually despise comments that point out that two pieces of
| (almost always unrelated) software share the same (or a
| similar) name. That doesn't apply in this case--
|
| Chandler has not only already been used for another piece of
| software, it has been used for something in what is roughly the
| same space. The other Chandler was discontinued >10 years ago,
| but I had to double check and triple check to suss out whether
| or not your Chandler is actually a reboot + a rewrite. And I'm
| still hedging (but I think the answer is "no, they're
| completely separate"). That's a confusing amount of similarity.
|
| EDIT: it looks like this has been pointed out. Even though it's
| "just" a codename, I'd recommend changing it to something like
| "chauncey" or "bingaling" or "miss-bong" or "skidmark" or
| something.
| BostonEnginerd wrote:
| The Monica /Chandler thing is a reference to the 90s
| television show "Friends".
| TylerE wrote:
| wooosh
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends#Cast_and_characters
| scrumper wrote:
| Parent isn't wrong. Chandler was a very interesting
| distributed PIM in (I think) the very early 2000s. It
| collapsed under the weight of its own ambition but it's a
| significant piece of software history, one of those
| alternative paths.
|
| And yes it's a TV character too, but Parent isn't wrong to
| point out the name collision.
| TylerE wrote:
| Your're wooshing yourself too. Chandler was a character
| on Friends. The parent project, Monica, is ALSO a
| character on Friends.
| ParadisoShlee wrote:
| Glad to see there is a future for monica. I've been a paid
| Monica user for a long time, and I've mostly been looking
| forward to a mobile app.
| emptysea wrote:
| Curious to learn more about the rewrite, do you have and docs
| handy?
|
| Edit: should have scrolled down more:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612776
| abraae wrote:
| I would really encourage you to push forward with OfficeLife. I
| believe the HR space is primed and ready for a decent open
| source offering. For what it's worth, APIs would be super
| useful, e.g. in the recruiting world there are hundreds of
| different background checks etc. that anyone serious needs to
| integrate with.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am not too sure about officelife, but i think there is a
| market for _internal relationship management_ at middle and
| large companies - often a mark of success is managing the
| internal network.
|
| This has been badly damanged during lockdown - just walking
| past someone's desk and being reminded I need to speak to
| them was useful. And just saying hi kept the "relationship"
| fresh
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm not sure why I would need this, especially now that I can
| codify my personal relationships in iOS and Android.
|
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/430990/how-to-teach-contact-...
| CharlesW wrote:
| For anyone taking this the wrong way, I'll frame it
| differently: My OS has my structured and unstructured contact
| data (including their relationships with me and to each other),
| a way to attach contacts to calendar events and notes, and a
| standard API that apps can use (at my discretion) to access
| that data. How does Monica use/improve on that?
| js8 wrote:
| Offtopic, but I am reminded by this idea of "Personal CRM". I
| would like to have a universal "Game ERP" system that I could
| plug-in (via mods) into different computer games, to organize
| inventories, keep track of production, plan goals, manage
| resources, chart progress etc.
| rrodriguez wrote:
| Have been using https://clay.earth for this and like it so far, a
| bit less manual work to keep it updated - but have used Monica
| and Evernote for this in the past with good success too.
| kkfx wrote:
| I prize all FLOSS effort, but try to observe a thing: here is a
| "PRM" (CRM), there a webmail, there something else, ALL not
| integrated AT ALL. It's not possible to integrate them since they
| are different applications.
|
| Now try looking at classic model: anything is a single
| application, from the OS to user-programmed simple automation.
| That's true for Smalltalk workstations to LispM. This is so
| effective that I found today far simpler and power using Emacs
| than any other modern software, even if modern Emacs just run on
| top of something else, lacking a LispM underneath, and even if
| it's development lag in many areas for modern usages.
|
| So to say: all FLOSS authors, instead of trying competing with
| commercial tools their way, do your best to resurrect the old
| way. Please choose to learn classic languages like Lisp (CL or
| anything else) or Smalltalk (see Pharo as an example) to
| rediscover the idea that there is NO APPLICATION but just one
| with various bits of code plugged is as needed. So for instance a
| PRM can include a mail system, a complete agenda/calendar system,
| ... without trying the Greenspun's tenth rule way, and fail as
| usual.
| jredwards wrote:
| I've started doing this with Obsidian, since I can template and
| query any type of data I want in it.
| beckingz wrote:
| How do you structure your data?
| gandreani wrote:
| I would also like to know! I use Obsidian for a lot and I'm
| constantly amazed by what other people think up of
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Not the person you asked, but I came to leave a similar
| comment. I was curious about Monica, but for a variety of
| reasons it didn't click for me.
|
| I use obsidian for tracking meetings, people, and documents
| in a civic engagement sphere. So hundreds of entities and a
| few meetings a week.
|
| I have folders for interpersonal meetings (calls, coffee
| dates, one on ones), public/group meetings, people, and a few
| other things. Every individual gets a top-level entry in the
| people folder. Every meeting or personal meeting gets a page
| in folder; folders are organized by year, then month. E.g
| meetings\2022\november\public forum with x on November 15,
| 2022.md
|
| I use templates for each document type; that helps me keep
| things consistent so I'm tracking the same information for
| meetings. For meetings I run, I have special templates that
| help keep me organized.
|
| When I take a note about a person saying something or
| attending a meeting, I type [[, then I get a list of people
| to choose from that autocompletes. I use the alias feature on
| people notes to track things like job titles, name
| variations, and acronyms.
|
| The approach is more flexible than Monica, and it lets me
| grow and change the data I collect over time. The tool is a
| super power. Obsidian tracks all the back links so if I want
| to find out which meetings a colleague was in, it is very
| easy to do that.
|
| I used to use OneNote but Obsidian is much more scalable. I'm
| putting 10x as much info in it as I ever did in OneNote and I
| expect to put 10-100x more before I move on to something
| else.
|
| Bonus notes:
|
| Obsidian plugin system is great and has a pretty robust, if
| not super well documented API. I'm working on plugins to
| automatically improve records and already have plugins that
| have saved hours on some special-purpose tags
|
| You can embed pdf documents like images and have a preview
| show up as an embed. Amazing for meeting agendas.
|
| If you have standard fields for notes, you can surface those
| in a table using dataview.
|
| Todoist integration is pretty cool if you want to make a
| "Dashboard" note for project management.
|
| The iOS version keeps the synced files on the file system.
| That means if you refer to a PDF, you can mark it up with a
| dedicated app (e.g. PDF expert) in place and keep it synced
| in your vault.
|
| You can create links before creating a matching note. This is
| great for fast moving meetings, and then you just need to
| click into the link to create a matching document.
| jms703 wrote:
| The authors are rewriting this software under a new name.
| https://github.com/monicahq/chandler
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Cue pleas to "Reinstate Monica"...
| muratsu wrote:
| Does anyone know why they are rewriting the whole thing? The
| github page doesn't mention the reasoning behind the decision
| lupire wrote:
| Rewrites are more fun than solving user problems
| unixhero wrote:
| Well this is a very simple system and could for instance be
| reimplemented in Ruby On Rails in ... a few days?
| robinhood wrote:
| Founder of Monica and Chandler here. It's so easy that the
| rewrite (aka Chandler) has taken Alexis and me 11 months so
| far, as a side project, and working most nights and
| weekends (check the number of commits). I know that Monica
| appears to be easy, and Chandler also, but it's not easy.
| Making a clone for yourself is easier, although not that
| easy if you want to replicate all the features. Making a
| clone for an entire community, which hosts Monica in tens
| of different configurations, means having a robust CI, a
| pipeline to package and deploy Docker images, a solid API,
| and so on and so on. I thought building a project like
| Monica was easy at first, but 6 years in, I can confidently
| say: it's really not.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I would be a wealthy man indeed if I had a dollar for
| every time some software engineer espoused, "This is
| crap! I could build a better one myself!".
|
| If you took away a dollar for every software engineer who
| I heard say that, and actually followed through, I'd
| still be a rich man.
| muratsu wrote:
| I'm sure it's not the most sophisticated software, but the
| repo has 3,736 commits over several years. I would imagine
| it would take them more than a few days :)
| endigma wrote:
| We do these things not because they are easy, but because
| we thought they would be easy.
| kapep wrote:
| It's mentioned on their blog:
| https://www.monicahq.com/blog/a-new-version-is-coming
|
| > [...] Monica is an old code base now. Old in the sense that
| it's 7 years old and it has been touched by hundred of
| contributors. There are some concepts in the code that we let
| through, because we either didn't know any better back then
| or because we didn't want to piss off contributors, that we
| don't want anymore. The project has way too many
| dependencies, and maintaining the code has become harder than
| it was before. Changing something is riskier, and takes more
| time. Also, we've seen how people use Monica, what they want
| to do with it, and the current code limits us way too much if
| we want to support what people want to use Monica for.
| Finally, Monica is still a side project for us. We are
| extremely passionate about it, and we want to also have fun
| building it. And the current version wasn't that fun.
| muratsu wrote:
| Thanks! Over the years I've seen several companies raise VC
| money for the personal CRM idea and fail. In a way, I'm
| glad they didn't raise outside capital and are able to
| sustain themselves while building something that they are
| clearly passionate about.
| robinhood wrote:
| Author of Chandler here. We are able to sustain the
| server costs, but we have full time jobs "on the side"
| because it's not sustainable. I don't know if it's ever
| will. Don't care :-) Raising capital would make this
| project a full time job, and put tremendous pressure on
| having to generate revenues. We don't want this pressure
| at all. We want to provide a nice and useful software
| because we are geeks and we want to do something good. I
| know it sounds naive and cliche but it's true. And if the
| project buys us a new computer from time to time, that's
| all that matters.
| nico wrote:
| Every re-write I've ever seen or been a part of, has either
| failed or taken way longer and a lot more effort than
| initially projected.
|
| Changing something is definitely not riskier, especially if
| you have tests and real users who are actively providing
| feedback as well as showing the edge cases. You can also
| focus on changing only the things that need changing,
| instead of having to redo everything just to change some
| things. A re-write also delays everything, since current
| users will probably not get any updates nor access to new
| features until the re-write can provide a good alternative
| to the existing system.
|
| Oh well, I guess since it's a side project for them, the
| learning and fun will be more important than providing a
| good experience to their users.
| robinhood wrote:
| Author of Chandler here. While rewriting the project is
| extremely fun and definitely a very good learning curve
| for us, we actually care A LOT about our users. I believe
| Chandler is much, much better to use than the current
| crappy Monica. It's easier, better UI and UX wise, and
| have way better features. And we are working our asses
| off to provide an API, and an importer to let you import
| your data so you won't lose anything. I agree, while we
| are rewriting the software, we don't have time to do
| anything on the current codebase, except bug fixes here
| and there. It's a price we have to pay unfortunately. So
| why do we rewrite? It's simple - the current codebase is
| old, and complex, and not fun to work on. We have merged
| things in the codebase from the community that we
| shouldn't have merge. The DB structure is old fashioned,
| and not flexible, so migrations would be a nightmare to
| do. I'm not saying it's not possible to improve the
| current codebase, but... that would be an actual job, and
| we don't want it to feel like a job.
| abraae wrote:
| > Every re-write I've ever seen or been a part of, has
| either failed or taken way longer and a lot more effort
| than initially projected.
|
| On the face of it what you say is true, but I've seen
| (and I'm sure many have seen) situations where the
| codebase was so bad - or the underlying technologies so
| ancient - that a rewrite was the only practical way to
| get things back on track again.
|
| Did the rewrite take way longer than initially projected?
| Yes.
|
| Was it a lot more effort than initially projected? Yes.
|
| Was it painful medicine that nonetheless left the
| business in a better place? Yes.
| blowski wrote:
| Chandler reminds me of the "Dreaming in Code" book, which
| didn't have a happy ending.
| homarp wrote:
| not to be confused with the magnificent fail that is
| https://www.chandlerproject.org/ famously depicted in
| http://www.dreamingincode.com/
|
| and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=271873
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Not to be confused with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software) I suppose ^^.
| robinhood wrote:
| Author of Monica/Chandler here. I didn't know that existed,
| thanks for pointing that out. That being said, Chandler is
| the codename. It'll be renamed to Monica once it's ready.
| photoGrant wrote:
| Monica had issues importing my contacts. Too many it says. I
| didn't have /that/ many. It always stopped me from exploring it
| further.
| anon400232 wrote:
| How many? (an estimate is ok)
| photoGrant wrote:
| I think it was around 1,000! At least last I remember that's
| what the limit was. I tried splitting my contacts into
| multiple groups but the effort wasn't worth it ultimately.
| samanator wrote:
| Thank you for posting this! I saw this posted on Hackernews a few
| years ago. I've looked for it since then a few times when wanting
| to get started on relationship management but could not remember
| enough about the project to find it via search engine.
|
| Sometimes Hackernews is like a very slow reverse search engine!
| jitix wrote:
| Really love the concept, will definitely try it on my raspberry
| pi. I've been trying to keep notes on likes/dislikes of
| acquaintances and this is way more organized.
|
| However I'm bit curious why it's not deployed as a standalone
| desktop or mobile app? Is there a technical limitation?
| ddelt wrote:
| I love the Friends reference behind both product names. I also
| have been using Obsidian for this (and before that, any generic
| note taking software).
|
| To me this sort of software is really powerful if you have the
| time to constantly tend to it. I wish I had this built into my
| mind.
| theptip wrote:
| > I wish I had this built into my mind
|
| One thing I am realizing over the years is that while it might
| seem so, the best "social people" don't actually have this
| built into their mind, they have some external system for
| capturing facts like the OP, and do the work to maintain it.
|
| Whether that is writing the name of the person you met at
| dinner into your diary when you get home (including info like
| spouse/children), or calendar invites for birthdays of everyone
| you know, or whatever.
|
| Reading "How to win friends and influence people" gives the
| same broad advice.
|
| As you say, it's a lot of work (though it might look effortless
| to interlocutors). But the flip-side of that observation is
| that anyone can get better by just using these practices. (Of
| course, social people are by definition more interested in this
| sort of study.)
| connordoner wrote:
| This has appeared on HN a few times over the years. In order of
| votes:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850155
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547
| thy77 wrote:
| Anyone have a review? Do you like Monica and Chandler better than
| Monday and Asana?
| mxuribe wrote:
| I've not used Monday, and I only used Asana for a few days when
| it first came out years ago. But i have used Monica somewhat
| minimally over the last year. So, my comments don't offer a
| fair comparison...But what i can say is that Monica hits the
| sweet spot of more than someone manually keeping notes in their
| mailbox or addressbok....but less than something like
| Salesforce, etc. Its actually well built from its minimalist UI
| to its succinct feature set to its basic (but good)
| notifications emails. If you're a sales person, or some actor's
| agent, or maybe work on a sales team, then maybe a more
| comprehensive CRM might be suitable...but for most other use
| cases, something like Monica works, and works quite well. They
| also offer a free plan (https://www.monicahq.com/pricing) with
| feature and contact limits, but its more than enough to get a
| feel for the service; to see if you might like it or not.
| (Considering that this is a side project for the creators, the
| limits are fair in my opinion.)
| mulderc wrote:
| This is the type of software I would really prefer not to have on
| a server. The only part of this I would want not on my device
| locally would be an encrypted backup.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's self hosted, so you could just run it on the local
| machine. It's a pity it uses MySQL because pgcrypto could
| enable you to make the database publicly visible.
| robinhood wrote:
| Founder of Monica/Chandler here. We support Postgre too, and
| SQLite on Chandler.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Very cool. I will give this is a shot this weekend.
| phkahler wrote:
| This would be great stand alone on a phone.
| robinhood wrote:
| Yes, but we don't know how to program on mobile. And if
| we took contractors, that would cost a lot of money,
| probably 20-30k USD.
| CA0DA wrote:
| I just saw this recently in Derek Sivers's (of CD Baby fame)
| book, read here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBpg-CWcHC0
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-15 23:00 UTC)